Uradiance

  Stop crying, "What should I do? Mercury is in retrograde!" What you should do is dance like the sky. All horoscopes tell one story. The universe is your reflection. O yes, your swirl of sun, moon, and planets has its own feral rhythm, hardly a waltz. But those chimeric baubles and spheres are wind chimes in the illusion of distance, all moved by one breath, yours. Seven billion birth charts singing the same chorus: You are made of light. Leo, Taurus, Aries and Capricorn, patient beasts of darkness roaming through the meadows of your body, munching karma: They are not "above." "Above" is a buried bulb in the stillness between heartbeats, and galaxies are clustered on the arbor of your spine, ripening their golden orbs into the nectar of awakening: ferment That! Drink the vintage of pure Being, 100 proof. Don't get burned by little sparks falling back down: Become the fire!       Painting by Bill Bell, 'The Astrologer's Dream'

  Of course the outraged are outraged that you are not outraged, but in truth, you are under no obligation to be angry. And though they are certain that the world cannot survive without their opinion, you are under no obligation to have an opinion about anything. Thoughts arise and dissolve like clouds in the empty sky. You cannot grasp them, so why try? To realize that you are not under any obligation to believe in your thoughts is the dawning of freedom. Why should we insist that they are "your" thoughts or "my" thoughts? You are not a being. You are Being itself. Bow your head and pour the ideology out of your skull. Your beliefs will compost next Spring's kale. To be green and useful, the uncreated light of heaven must pass through the belly of an earthworm. Your mind is just dark energy billowing out of the void in the axis of a neuron. You came here to be astonished. You came to meet your friends in Rumi's meadow, out beyond opinions. Bring an empty cu...

True listeners live in the heart. They love the gossip of raindrops, the breaking news of Spring peepers.   Say less than you mean. Grace is the gift of subtraction. The trembling crystal of a chickadee proclaims the whole Godspell.   Tell as little as a willow by a pond where the heron glides away on the first breath of twilight.   And if you must speak, leave a rippled stillness between words, the kind of mirror where that long-beaked huntress might pause   on one leg all a golden afternoon. Be more like the moon between clouds, until your silences say everything. Photo by Victoria Pittman    

  ( Written during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020) I'm sorry to say how sonorous earth would be without us, how clear the voice of streams plucking their harps of stone, the waterfall-chant of leaping salmon, goat bleats erupting from the torn pomegranate of the nanny. How fresh the smell of rain and sweet the pollen on the bee's feet, hum of rummaging among wild roses: but who would make the Poem? A dolphin perhaps, or an elephant on the shore, susurrus of black flies f leeing her swished ear? A stir in the leaf-languor jasmine, rattle of palm fronds scenting storm, frolic of pelicans skimming the whitecaps for carp? One verse of the Poem might be a logos of waves stroking coral, pink in the grouper's gaze, his mouth articulating bubbles in the mindfulness of the shark. Or the whirring return of vast hunger to the belly of the hummingbird. A rustle in the pelt of an elk before his bugling stuns the world back into silence. How pat...

Every atom of your body is mine. Every molecule of me is yours. We digest each another. Sustained by what consumes us, we are food. This meal ended before there was light, before leaves, mold, microbes, wings and rain, when every creature was dissolved in the juice of silence. Creation is only a liqueur. Now I see through candle flames a swirl of galaxies that were to be your eyes until the Source got intoxicated with making you. Let us have our pousse-cafe and then go dancing in the belly of the Goddess.

A naked breath and all is silken clear: the ash leaf crinkled by October sun, the caterpillar’s need to disappear in rainbow dreams of trembling darkness, spun by uncreated wings in the cocoon, the sweet diaphanous allure of thread between a sleepless spider and the moon entangled like a specter of the dead. Now split an Autumn gourd and smell the musk of emptiness, the dim pain we must feel and savor deep beneath our ruddy husk. Taste every shadow sunlight might reveal, and stay, where shriveled berries are reborn. One pure nectar seeps through rose and thorn.   Photograph by Jean-Francois Beaudry in National Geographic

Drink the full moon. Hold her as a breath, then set her back gently in the sky. Gaze awhile and you will see the blaze of your own tenderness, the bruise of your caress. She loved that. It awakened her. Now, with your whole body, you must teach God how to kiss.

In the ordinary of the season, to notice is to worship.   Musk odor in the hollow of the last pear. The garden withered to its root, still amber with warmth,  the tint of collapse, of fallen  happiness well-seated. Your beaten heart releases the scent  of something rain has unshaped. Loss tastes more delicious than music. Your mind stream grows so clear it reflects the abysmal blue  of its otherness, the sky. Starting at the edges, all creatures burn inward toward their center. Now is the season of understanding that the soul is the deepest organ in your body, and it is on fire. Even your wings are lit by death,  and a mighty empire falls around you  like a brittle leaf. Listen for the luscious chafe  of silence within silence, like the murmur of water under snow, the perishing of a bell. Let this sound claim you. God needs no dearer name. Merely a breath, this whisp...

When you discover that this very breath is the subtle, most intimate body of the Goddess, She that played with the Almighty at the creation of the universe, swirling her sweet milk into galaxies, then you can rest in your heartbeat, whose silence says more than all the words of scripture, and savor the whole story of salvation in the rising and falling of your chest. Photo by Aile Shebar

When I discovered the emerald hidden in my ribs, I gave up duty and skill, wealth, adventure, and fame just to follow this menial vocation: I became a Jewel Polisher! I keep moving the ragged cloth of this breath, moistened with the tincture of pure awareness, over the chalice in my heart until golden emptiness itself becomes wine, each drop a gem of hopeless wonder deeper inside than my name, reflecting a world beyond confusion, without edges, where meadow and forest, the wreathe of clouds, the incandescent blackness of night in the panther-eye of the unhoused stranger, even the face of the beloved who lies beside me, are all one nimbus gleaming out of my body. Now consider that you also might mother creation through this simple work, the rhythm of stillness. Photo by Laurent Berthier

A moment in September at the hour of uncertainty between night and morning (is there any other hour?) when emptiness solidifies into its crystal element of pain, or bliss, which are the same nectar, the same sap, and silence falls as the first fruit of your harvest (leave some here, food for the wanderer.) It is the moment when I hear the spider out in the night that has not yet come weaving a net to hold the moon that is not yet full. The ululation of the bold coyote mother giving birth among withered morning glories that cluster the chassis of an abandoned truck. The elegant blood-thirst of the owl hovering over a rabbit. Surely this is a moment when the mind slips out of memory into something more uncomfortable, more awake, and the heart slips out of the husk into sweet lascivia, the pungent chaos of mushrooms. What is the chosen fragrance of the naked and the beautiful? Vulnerability. Surely this is the moment when the whole season whispers through trillions of translucent delicate...

If you choose silence, silence chooses you. Then you hear the last petals of summer fall in the dying garden. You see a long way, how stars got entangled in the spider's web, transparency of alder leaf, your grandmother's hand. Peace comes without ceremony, the way the moon hides her face in a veil of tears. Your tears. No votive flame of consolation. No bell of mindfulness. No lover's elegiac midnight kiss. Quiet as evaporating dew, the fist of your dear heart unclenches, you scent the old fragrance of loss, and survive. Photo:Demeter in my Autumn yard with sheaves of wheat and the last begonias

What is an "activist"? You can be an activist planting Winter squash, gathering apples, walking in a fern forest, listening to your children, or smiling from your heart at someone who is lonely. True activism means, to gently immerse your whole astonished body in the river of Presence. To be moved by the breath of beauty like a golden leaf, falling right where you are. To drown in the mystery of communion with whoever stands before you, and serve them by Being. Out of Being, doing arises. This is love. And whatever action happens in that moment is your politics. The politics of compassion has no party, and no platform. It is groundless. A disheveled crow, a boy in the rain with his shining basketball, a spider web catching the moon, a crone at the grocery store marveling at all the soup. These are your tribe. This is your native country. It is all a sacred homeland. Earth is not transfigured by how much you do, but how wantonly, how nakedly you plunge into the ocean of this p...

  No need for me to tell you my Master's name. No need to show you my Savior's face. Just come a little nearer to my chest and you will catch fire. I know the world hurts. But there is a very safe place right here where this breath arises, this pulse is born, and the moon drinks all the light she needs from the bright stream of the heart’s silence. Rest here, friend. Don't be afraid. And don't come alone. Bring thousands with you.       Photo by Laurent Berthier

Lesha-Vidya (Sanskrit) means "the faint remaining seed of ignorance." Leshavidya can be the seed of humble service, or the seed of a yogi's downfall, depending on whether it is acknowledged. So-called "spiritual teachers" must consciously embrace Leshavidya, so as not to forget that they are merely human, or imagine that they have become "God." After their "enlightenment experience," this seed patiently and secretly accompanies them on their journey. They become successful gurus and life coaches, with profitable non-profit corporations,  glossy websites, and global hierarchies of adoring followers. But even the "enlightened" must acknowledge the faint seed of ego in themselves, and hug it with consciousness. The wise teacher does not attempt to destroy this seed or deny that it is there; but actually utilizes Leshavidya, as the key to humble empathy with ordinary people, and as prayerful player in living relationship with the di...

                                      Sometimes you cry, but these are not your tears. They are the tears of the moon, the tears of September. Sometimes the tears have no eye. Tears of trees, pelicans, old staggering elk with ruined antlers, gray tears of the mountain pouring from loam to loam through your body. Tears of time, a time for dropping petals and last berries, time to settle and lean bare into mothering darkness. Don't explain it away, how beauty is so much like sorrow, the silken crack in your clay shaped like a vast bolt of lightning. Repair it with liquid gold. Be kintsugi. As for the leaf on a useless bench in my garden, one of a myriad fallen things, the season is rich with brittle offerings. Pouring from loam to loam through your body, sometimes the tears have no I. Photo: yes the old useless bench in my garden

  I've been seeing lots of social media pictures of cats upside down, or gazing from on high. So I decided to tune in to the spirit of Basquiat, an upside down cat who was my landlady for 22 years (pictures above). She still watches over my family and she is wise. This is what she wants us to know: "Thinking is overrated. Positive energy doesn't come from positive thinking. Positive thinking comes from positive energy. And positive energy comes from a silent golden explosion of Being out of the void at the core of every photon in your flesh, which is also the black hole at the center of each galaxy. So stop worrying and be what you Are. "You are infinite. You are the womb of light. You are the all-pervading center. Feel the energy that is so full of joy it has no other meaning, no other purpose but what it Is. You are my Am, and I Am yours, and We Are myriad ever-dissolving Selves in the holographic quantum crystal of this moment. So stop worrying and pyrrh."

  "When the spiritual power of the Kundalini Shakti enters the heart center, the self-begotten unstruck music of God begins to be heard." ~Jnaneshwar, b. 1275   She comes in the form of this breath. She dances as the dawn of awareness in the fading of sleep. The dream was never real. You need no mala, no beads to invoke her. Darkness sparkles. Night itself has been your rosary of pearls, each moment rounded, gleaming with eternity. Your Guru is her silence, respiration of the unchangeable. O breath, what do you teach us this morning? Stillness is pulsation - hollow, full, hollow, full - the way of the moon. Corn and wheat, a withered husk, and finally a seed, the ordinary of the seasons explaining everything in pigment, pungency and musk, in excruciating sweetness, and what rattles in the zero of a gourd. The order of unsettled weather is the mother of ceremony; rain and sun the daughters of the sky; Midnight a cup for the elixir of stars, this light fermented by ancient dist...

"Truth is the only thing you'll ever run into  that has no agenda." ~Adyashanti   Your radiance outshines earthly form. The worm loam, the white dahlia, the moldering corpse, the newborn baby all have your face. Your radiance outshines the human mind. No thought contains you. Every desire has your face. Marveling at your radiance, the archangel and the cow gaze with one eye. Your compassion outshines every law. No scripture contains you. When you glance at me there is no right or wrong. If I cannot see you in the one I despise, then the face of Jesus is a plastic flower. No mirror contains the light of wonder. Your body is silence, the explosion of molten paradox. I keep it gold and warm, near the heart, so you don't congeal into opposites. When you burst out of my center, my center is everywhere. The ones I feel sorry for are those who still think this world of pain and beauty has any meaning, any purpose... They haven't tasted one spoonful of your dust. They hav...

"God hugs you, you are encircled by the arms of the mystery." ~Hildegard of Bingen God hug me whole and round me with bright thirst, then crush my clustered loveliness to wine. And with no feet to tread, may God use mine, or be the cup in whom I am immersed - the sky sphered sapphire in a robin's egg, music spilling from a hollow reed, the circle of my breath, a prayer to beg of stars the fire to sing, of You the need. Small violets dew'd with dawn's dissolving pearl remind me to be grateful for this mere vanishing moment, when twinned spirits twirl, mine in yours, like pollen in a tear. Love suffers perfect loss, yet owns no less. The more our hearts surrender, more possess.